A key player in a joint venture between Hunter Biden and one of Communist China’s largest private companies, CEFC China Energy, is scheduled to be questioned Thursday as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
That key figure, Mervyn Yan, is a private equity manager and investor based in New York who facilitated key portions of the Hudson West III joint venture owned by Owasco, one of Hunter Biden’s companies, and Hudson West V, a company controlled by CEFC China Energy.
Initial hopes for a long-term relationship between CEFC and the Biden family were dashed following legal action in the U.S. against Patrick Ho, the head of the Chinese company’s U.S. think tank, and in China against CEFC’s chairman, Ye Jianming.
Hunter Biden once described Ho to a friend as “the f—ing spy chief of China.”
Since commencing their investigation of possible influence peddling by the Biden family, Republicans on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee have focused on what they say is a scheme, repeated across multiple companies and individuals, in which foreign entities paid members of the Biden family in return for access to top officials, including the senior Biden when he was vice president.
CEFC China Energy, formed in 2002, had over $48 billion in revenue in 2015 and over 30,000 employees at the end of that year. CEFC supposedly is a private company, but evidence suggests it was influenced by the Chinese Communist Party.
In January 2017, in a story referring to the Czech Republic, Reuters news service reported that little was known about the ownership of CEFC China Energy, writing: “CEFC’s wide range of investments in the central European nation and its hiring of politically connected figures there has led to questions in the Czech media about whether CEFC is purely commercially driven or is operating under the influence of the Chinese government.”
To date, House investigators looking into the CEFC component of the alleged Biden family scheme have uncovered payments of over $4.8 million to at least three family members, as well as at least one direct meeting between CEFC and Biden when he was vice president to President Barack Obama.
Ongoing work by investigators for the Oversight Committee and the Judiciary Committee aims to clarify the extent of the senior Biden’s involvement in the financial and business relationship between his son Hunter and the Chinese business, as well as both parties’ expectations for the services the Bidens would provide.
Yan, who was to sit for a transcribed interview Thursday with congressional investigators, is one of only a few firsthand witnesses to the interaction between CEFC China Energy and the Bidens whom Congress has succeeded in subpoenaing.
Hunter Biden himself is scheduled for a congressional deposition Feb. 28, but the two House committees are still trying to schedule an interview of Jim Biden, the president’s brother and Hunter’s uncle.
CEFC: A Collector of Top Officials
At its peak, CEFC China Energy was a billion-dollar business that played a key role in advancing China’s “Belt and Road” initiative.
Based on 2018 reporting by The New York Times and more recent congressional investigations, the public has learned that, at the same time CEFC was advancing the Belt and Road initiative, company Chairman Ye and other top officials created a think tank in America to cultivate relationships with top government officials here and elsewhere. Ho was the head of CEFC’s U.S.-based think tank.
CEFC, with Ho’s help, was able to nurture those relationships by offering hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to influential former government officials. For example, Bobby Ray Inman, a former director of the National Security Agency, reported declining an offer from the Chinese company that would have paid him $1 million per year for businesses that were not specified.
As in the case of CEFC China Energy’s initial outreach to Inman, who also was a former CIA deputy director and national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, the reason for the Chinese company’s financial overtures often were unspecified or opaque on their surface. However, publicly available information suggests that CEFC’s ultimate goal was buying political influence.
For example, Inman told The New York Times that he later rebuffed a second request from a CEFC official—this time explicitly asking for help persuading the U.S. military not to bomb oil resources in Syria that the Chinese company was considering purchasing
In other cases, influential former U.S. government officials didn’t decline CEFC’s money; the company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a pair of think tanks headed by James Woolsey, CIA director during President Bill Clinton’s administration, and Vuk Jeremic, president of the U.N. General Assembly in 2012 and 2013.
Notably, Jeremic failed to respond to a letter from the House Oversight and Accountability Committee in February 2023.
CEFC China Energy also donated hundreds of thousands more to the Clinton Foundation, the nonprofit formed and run by Clinton, his wife Hillary Clinton, and their daughter Chelsea Clinton.
One troubling example in which it appears CEFC’s overtures succeeded is outlined in a Justice Department indictment of Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, or IAGS—a think tank founded by Woolsey.
The indictment, unsealed in July 2023, charges Luft with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act by, among other things, working with Ho and Ye to recruit and pay Woolsey (identified as “individual-1” in the Luft indictment) to “publicly support certain policies with respect to China.” It says:
Yan a Key Player in Biden Family Business
The FBI arrested Ho in the U.S. in November 2017 and he later was charged with and convicted of international bribery and money laundering. Ye disappeared into China’s murky legal system after being detained in early 2018, and has not been seen since.
After Ho’s arrest, Biden family members and their legal team worked with Yan, the equity manager, to quickly dissolve Hudson West III and sever all connections between the Biden family and CEFC China Energy. In the period between formation and disillusion, Yan also played a key role in operational aspects of Hunter Biden’s Hudson West venture.
Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, subpoenaed Yan in November to appear for questioning.
It isn’t clear whether the Justice Department previously had interviewed or investigated Yan regarding either Hunter Biden’s alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act or official probes of Ho or other CEFC affiliates.
Yan’s deposition by congressional investigators likely will focus not only on the details of the financial arrangement between CEFC China Energy and the Bidens, but also on both parties’ motivations and the types of business they planned.
Scrutiny of Illegitimate Loans
Questions from congressional investigators about Yan’s financial dealings are likely to focus on several overarching topics.
One area of potential interest is a $5 million nonrecourse loan from CEFC China Energy to Hunter Biden’s Hudson West III. Much of the proceeds of this loan ultimately benefited members of the Biden family.
Yan played an important role in distributing money to the Bidens by setting up Hudson West III’s initial bank and credit card accounts, which he provided to Hunter Biden and to his uncle and aunt, Jim and Sarah Biden (Joe Biden’s brother and sister-in-law).
CEFC’s nonrecourse loan to the younger Biden’s venture, which wasn’t repaid, has been characterized by Republican lawmakers as a bribe disguised as a loan.
Hunter Biden’s history of nonrecourse loans also drew the scrutiny of Gary Shapley, a career criminal investigator at the Internal Revenue Service who later became a whistleblower for congressional investigators. Shapely has stated that the loans lacked regular elements such as promissory notes, defined interest, and scheduled repayments over time.
A second topic of interest to investigators, the hurried dissolution of Hudson West III, provides further evidence of the informal nature of this large payment to the Bidens.
Multiple documents from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, first released by the conservative research organization Marco Polo and reviewed by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, are relevant to the ongoing impeachment inquiry. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
One document, an email sent the month after Ye’s detention in China, was written as CEFC China Energy began to dissolve. In the email, Hunter Biden’s secretary at Hudson West III, JiaQi Bao, encourages the younger Biden to think of the financial agreement between himself and Ye as a personal agreement.
She writes that “it doesn’t matter whether the left-over operations funds [are] labeled as ‘personal goodwill/loan’ or ‘non-recourse,’ ‘recourse,’ ‘borrowing/drawing’ … just take it and keep as much as possible.”
Bao, then in her late 20s and a graduate of Arizona State University and China’s Tsinghua University, first appears in the contents of the younger Biden’s laptop in connection with the Hudson West III joint venture as a personal assistant. She later would write to him to encourage his father’s presidential bid in 2020.
Strangely, in an email replying to another message that she had been let go because of the dissolution of Hudson West III, Bao gave advice to Hunter Biden to “keep as much money as you can.”
It appears that the president’s son took her advice, because nearly a year later Yan apparently was unsure how to treat the unorthodox payment to the younger Biden for tax purposes.
This was because Hudson West III, which made loans to the younger Biden, had been dissolved without loan repayment.
A final relevant document details the care taken by Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires—working with Yan, the younger Biden, and CEFC affiliate Gongwen “Kevin” Dong—to “effectively divorce” companies in which Biden held an ownership stake from the Chinese company and its affiliates.
In this communication, Mesires explains to Hunter Biden and his uncle, Jim Biden, that neither Yan nor his company, Cold Harbor Capital LLC (which would replace Hudson West V in the joint venture with the younger Biden) were affiliated with CEFC China Energy.
Investigations by Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., determined that Yan and his company were the beneficiary of over $318,000 from activities related to Hudson West III.
One sticking point in this “divorce” between members of the Biden family and CEFC China Energy involved office-sharing agreements and lease agreements between Biden entities and CEFC Infrastructure Investment (US) LLC, a subsidiary of CEFC China Energy.
Documents show that the younger Biden’s Hudson West III shared office space with CEFC in New York City at 3 Columbus Circle. Documents also show that the Bidens planned joint office space with CEFC in the Georgetown neighborhood at House of Sweden, one of the most exclusive waterfront buildings in the nation’s capital.
According to emails, the D.C. office was to be occupied by Joe Biden, his wife Jill, brother Jim, and son Hunter, along with the younger Biden’s business partner Dong, whom he characterized as an “emissary” of Ye, CEFC’s chairman.
In one 2017 email, the younger Biden refers to Yan as one of “my partners.”
It’s not clear whether the office at 3 Columbus Circle was among the properties raided by the FBI following Ho’s arrest Nov. 18, 2017.
Chinese authorities arrested Ye about four months later, and CEFC China Energy subsequently went bankrupt.
Questions of Motive
A little more than a week before the FBI arrested Ho, Hunter Biden sent a message to Dong, asking him to pass it to “C,” presumably “Chairman Ye.”
The younger Biden, writing from an email account that uses his legal first name, Robert, wrote that “my uncle and myself are grateful for your wisdom of including Kevin [Gongwen Dong] and Mervyn [Yan] in this endeavor.”
The indication that Yan and “CEFC emissary” Dong were both suggested by Ye, coupled with the coincident timing of Yan’s appearance in emails that initially discussed a Biden-CEFC joint venture, casts doubt on the assertion by Miseres, the younger Biden’s lawyer, that “Mervyn [Yan] indicated that he has no affiliation with CEFC.”
Indeed, it seems possible that the formal separation of Yan and CEFC China Energy may have masked an informal relationship that was much cozier.
If correct, this structure is reminiscent of a conversation that former business partner Tony Bobulinski claims he had in May 2017 with Jim Biden.
In that conversation, Bobulinski said, Joe Biden’s brother explained that he wasn’t worried about business deals with the Chinese or other foreign entities risking his brother’s future presidential campaign because of “plausible deniability.”
That same month, Hunter Biden and his partners circulated a business prospectus titled “CEFC China Energy Investment Vehicle: Targeted Geographics for Development.” Among other topics, this document highlighted Joe Biden’s relationship with foreign leaders in Colombia as part of what Bobulinski described as a “framework for a partnership between CEFC China and local partners, with a solid basis starting and the very foundations of the country’s administration.”
Bobulinksi is scheduled to be interviewed by House investigators Feb. 5.
In questioning Yan this week, congressional investigators have one of only a limited number of chances to peel back any layers of “plausible deniability” that still may exist between President Joe Biden and CEFC China Energy in the minds of Americans.
Ultimately, what is most important is that Americans be provided with as much evidence as possible with which to judge for themselves how far a major Chinese company’s apparent political influence operation traveled through the Biden family.
This report was modified Jan. 25, the day after publication, to include more details on scheduled interviews and to specify that House investigators began questioning Yan on Thursday.
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